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It’s fast approaching and with Christmas comes the annual assault on your ear canals courtesy of Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, and, of course, Mariah Carey’s yearly airwave domination with ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
Euronews Culture previously handpicked music antidotes to the clichéd holiday tracks which radios will be blaring out until you’ve reached the point of no return. However, not everyone got the memo, and Americans are feeling the Scrooge-like temptation to reach for the earplugs. As evidenced by FinanceBuzz, which compiled the 10 most annoying Christmas songs – basing their results on data from Google Trends, along with their survey of 1,250 US adults.
The results are hardly surprising, and no points for guessing who clinched the Number 1 spot on the naughty list.
It’s… Mariah’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
Of course it is. It’s a choice we’d all make, and one we not-so-subtly spoiled with the banner image above.
Before we get to Mariah, here is the top 10 of the worst offenders:
- Mariah Carey – ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’
- Alvin and the Chipmunks / David Seville – ‘The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)’
- Jose Feliciano – ‘Feliz Navidad’
- Burl Ives – ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’
- Every version of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’
- Every version of ‘Deck The Halls’
- John Lennon and Yoko Ono – ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’
- Every version of ‘White Christmas’
- Paul McCartney – ‘Wonderful Christmastime’
- Every version of ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’
Mariah Carey’s yuletide anthem was released in 1994 and it has become unavoidable during the Christmas period.
With digital downloads and then streaming, the song has endured over the decades and works its way up the charts each Christmas. This week, she’s become the first artist in history to spend 98 weeks at Number 1 on the Hot 100 in the US – and she’s expected to reach 100 weeks this year.
‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ is the most-streamed holiday track of all time, and with that impressive performance comes equally impressive royalties, as Carey continues to reap the benefits from the song. She earns an estimated $2.5-$3 million each year from the song, according to data from Forbes.
And she’ll continue to do so, as we reported earlier this year that Carey has been cleared in a lawsuit over ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
The country singer Andy Stone – who performs under the stage name Vince Vance – had filed a $20 million suit against Carey in a Los Angeles federal court back in November 2023.
Stone’s suit said: “’All I Want For Christmas Is You’ contains a unique linguistic structure where a person, disillusioned with expensive gifts and seasonal comforts, wants to be with their loved one, and accordingly writes a letter to Santa Claus.” It highlighted an “overwhelming likelihood” Carey had heard the song and infringed copyright by taking significant elements from it.
“If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, previously said.
Judge Monica Ramirez Almadini ruled that Stone’s lawyers had not “met their burden of showing” that the two songs were “substantially similar”.
So, do you agree with US listeners on their pick of the most annoying Christmas song? Have you given our selection of the Best Christmas Albums a spin? Do. It may provide you and your ears some much-needed festive respite.